I think this is a problem of the capitalist system the ad-based websites exist in. There is an expectation for continuous growth, and if showing ads is the main source of income, the only way to grow after a certain point (user base not growing a lot any more) is to be more and more intrusive to shove more and more ads in the users faces. At some point we’re fed up with the ads to the point it is not worth visiting the site anymore.
If growth weren’t expected we could have stopped at a reasonable level of ads that are not as intrusive and had a steady income to cover the cost of running the site as long as the users are satisfied. But unfortunately everything anyone wants to use the internet for these days becomes a get rich quick scheme, causing the eventual enshittification of most sites.
This is why I like self hosted services, community funded, non profits, etc. For example wikipedia, and beehaw 🙂. It feels good donating when I can trust that the site owners have good intentions. It does not feel good to pay a subscription to a mega-corporation to avoid ads.
I can’t help but think of a comparison with print newspapers, which undoubtedly is where the idea of funding the internet through ads started. It made a certain sense: newspapers and magazines partially support themselves through adverts, so websites (particularly those with regularly updated content) could also rely on ad revenue.
But the big difference is that with a print newspaper, the customer pays to buy the paper, and the customer also has the choice to not look at the ads. I’ve got a print newspaper subscription. All the ads are clustered together on a few specific pages, not interspersed amongst the real content, which allows me to just skip right past them.
Ads on the internet, however, have become increasingly insidious over the years, often blocking access to the website’s real content. And the more obnoxious they are and the harder they are for people to avoid, the more likely people are to utilise adblockers, because ultimately they want to see ads on the internet about as much as I want to read the adverts page in the newspaper (apart from the personal ads, those are a good giggle). Forcing people to look at content they don’t want to look at is always going to end badly.
I’m quite happy for the ad-based internet to die. Websites with good content and good communities don’t need revenue from adverts, because they will always have support from the communities they create. Most people aren’t averse to donating even a few {currency of choice} to help keep something they love running, especially when they know it’s not an extractive, exploitative business model.
I started delivering newspapers when I was 10 years old. The problem I inevitably ran into was that certain people didn’t want to pay for the product and I was out the money I had to pay to initially buy the newspaper for them.
When customers refused to pay for their subscription, I stopped delivering their newspaper.
While nobody wants an Internet behind a paywall, there does need to be a certain equilibrium between content and services while maintaining the ability to fund and perpetuate them.
But, I agree that the whole modern ad and marketing system is completely rotten.
I would rather pay for the services I use if they don’t charge much more than they make off of us in ads, and remove ads entirely. Then advertisers could not control what content I can see. It also adds another barrier between people and the services, look at what happens when a game goes free to play. The quality of the playerbase drops. Trolls might think twice if being banned means they have to pay for a new account.
The equilibrium would be fine if they never made the mistake of annoying their users. I got tired of pop-ups, animated desktop stripper ads, random loud audio, drive-by malware and fake download buttons, and most recently, interrupting my videos and games to show me 30 second ads. It’s that kind of overzealous creep the led to this problem on their end.
Ha! You just reminded me of that random girl that would start dancing at the bottom of your browser, but that’s pretty dated now. Unless they’re still there?!
Idk… Creator goes on about how ad funded internet ruined the internet and then does a hard 180 saying that he can’t sustain himself without ad based internet as a content creator.
Which… I thought that was his point? Idk very mixed messaging from him.
I felt like he was very up front about how the current system, as unfriendly to users as it is, is what has made it possible for him to make a living doing what he loves to do. He even comes out at the end and says if big companies can’t figure out a post-advertising business model, they’ll likely die off, and that means he and people like him are out of a job, ‘and that’s probably the best scenario for users.’ Both ideas — that ad-funded internet ruined the internet, and that ad-funded internet allowed him and thousands of people like him to make a living on that internet — can be true at the exact same time.
To be fair, I think his point is pretty clear: No ad based content means potentially no more "influencers" or content creators, but with the up side that the internet would become healthier. He's basically acknowledging that his whole job is sustained by a business model that's not entirely healthy for the internet despite being entirely dependent on it.
I am not sure how to interpret “no more influencers” as anything but the primary upside.
Mostly that’s a joke, but to be clear I do acknowledge that the same model that supports ‘influencers’ which I don’t watch, also support creators that I do watch. On the other hand, most of the creators I care about already don’t rely on ads, but accept donations via Patreon or equivalent, so maybe it wouldn’t change anything after all!
